Preview - Heretic Pixies Halloween Editions

With Halloween coming so soon after the launch of the first Heretic Pixies resin figures we couldn't resist putting out 5 Halloween themed figures. These figures will shortly be available from our store http://paleheretic.bigcartel.com .

The figures come in two variations - Skullz and Pum'kinz. These photos give an idea of the Skullz figures. We are currently experiementing with accessories for them and are looking at hand stitched felt hats and black cast resin demon masks, but this will be confirmed later.



The Pum'kinz are still mid paint, but this photo will give you an idea of what to expect.

Heretic Pixies - The first seven ...

I've had the idea of producing custom toys in the back of my head for a couple of years. The Heretic pixies seemed like the perfect set of characters to try and I'm pleased to say we've done it!

The figures themselves are made from my original sculpts and are cast in Easyflow 60 resin. Each pixie is individually painted - they're all different, all unique and all numbered. The platform that you can see in the image above is the first of a number of variants that we'll be producing over the coming months. Take a look at the Pale Heretic online store here to see more of the pixies ... http://paleheretic.bigcartel.com.

We also undertake commissions so if you're like a pixie, personalised for you then please get in touch.

The problem with car design and the motor industry is.....

.... that the product they are selling doesn't really fit the intended use.

This post comes from a conversation a colleague and I had on the drive out to see a client.

My basic theory is this: the majority of cars that are sold today, are being sold on a range of features that aren't really compatible with safe and environmentally friendly use on urban roads.

The first part of this was sparked off by my asking 'why don't all cars sold today have a GPS linked to the engine management, so that in urban areas the speedlimits can be automatically enforced?'. This seems to me like a fairly obvious way of reducing the speed of the traffic for the price of a (guessing) £150-250 component.

My colleague pointed out that this would be a very un-popular move and probably terminal for the government that attempted to bring it in.

This prompted the discussion about cars and how they are marketed. Speed and power are very significant factors in this even still. It has been refreshing to see fuel economy finally getting the headline slot in the adverts for some cars, but it is still a minority that are discussing this.

I think the issue goes beyond the marketing however, to the way that as a product cars are designed. It seems to me that cars are being built as though for racing and then sold for use on the roads. Many cars are over-powered for the intended use, designed to deliver top-speeds far in excess of the legal speed limits and matching acceleration. Cars aren't it seems designed to operate as efficiently as possible at 30mph - the speed that most cars (used in cities or urban area) spend most of their lives driving at. To the point where in some of the cars that I've driven they are hard to keep down to the speedlimit and need to be contantly reigned in.

Hence the GPS linked speed limiting. If we continue developing cars as they currently are, designed for speed and acceleration, maybe we should be using some of the readily available technology to ensure that this power is used in an appropriate setting - the motorways, not on the urban roads.

Pale Heretic wins Skullcandy wallpaper competition

I'm very pleased to report that we have been selected as this months winning entry in the Skullcandy desktop wallpaper design competition. You can see the winners here.

An extended range of sizes and an alternative version can be found on our website www.paleheretic.co.uk.

On a personal note, I love both the product and the brand from Skullcandy, so I'm particularly pleased to have won this. Thanks guys!

Limited Editions For All

I'm old enough to remeber numbered, limited edition vinyl EPs and boxed-sets of singles. These things had a huge value in a niche way, because the were exactly that: limited editions. They were usually lavishly packaged compared to the regular edition, included extra tracks often unreleased anywhere else and other items such as postcards.

Things are changing as internet technology and online personalisation reaches out into the consumer products market. For a long time now, you've been able to purchase your iPod direct from Apple and have a message laser etched into the back of the case. More recently Timberland have added a feature to their website where you can customise your boots as you order them, including an embroidered monogram. Moon Pig are now offering to custom print greetings cards with the message of your choice. Bob Books will print and bind a hardback book of your choice from images you upload via their website.

It strikes me that this is then end of the limited edition as we know it - or possibly a proliferation of the range of limited editions.

Either the mass accessibility of personalisation with consumer products will reduce the interest in 'designed' limited editions *OR* the easy access to the new design tools for this new generation of personalised products will lead to an increase in the number of amateur designers using these new tools to produce their own limited runs of pre-personalised products. I'm watching closely to for which way it goes, but I hope the latter, not the former.

EeePC 900

I don't have a huge amount of luck with laptops. I spend easily 6 hours a day (sometime much more) using mine and I guess I expect quite a lot from it - high performance, long battery life light weight small footprint. You know. The things you pay an absolute fortune for. Only I refuse to pay and absolute fortune for a laptop. I guess £800 is about my maximum. Let's face it, if I go and buy a £2000 laptop and around about half-way through my third day of ownership, I'll drop it.

So that's why I chose my HP Pavillion DV2000. 14.1 inch, 3 hours battery, powerful enough, looked nice. Two years happy computing later and the hard drive finally dies, which was only to be expected really as I commute for between 3 and 4 hours every day, which means may laptop gets thoroughly shaken about.

New hard drive, take the plunge with Linux (Ubunbtu then OpenSuSE) and all is good. Then last Thursday I turn my trusty laptop on to the sound of random crackles from the speakers and nothing else, no bios messages, nothing. OK. Time to do two things: replace my laptop with something temporary, repair my old laptop.

A number of people I know have bought (and are universally happy with) eeePC 701s. Given my recent switch away from MS Windows and onto Linux the idea of a small Linux based laptop is very attractive. The screen was a bit of a sticking point though. A little small. But not on the 900 series. The other fact that sold me on this was the solid state disk - 20GB, no moving parts (so less prone to breaking).

One shopping trip later, and for the quite reasonable price of £329 I'm the owner of an EeePC 900, Linux, 20GB.

The initial OS runs in tabbed 'wizard' mode. I have to say this was a little uncomfortable as it makes the eeePC as easy to use and accessible as mobile phone, but makes it hard to get beyond the default set of applications. A quick search of web gives a number of pages that provide access to relatively (assuming you know a little about Linux) easy methods for switching to a standard KDE window manager referred to as 'advanced desktop'.

One thing that I did try was installing an alternative Linux distribution. Installing OpenSuSE 10.3 went rather easily, and worked exactly as you would expect it to. Drivers were easily available for just about everything, and the experience and Gnome (my preference over KDE) worked fine.
One reason has made me reinstall the default OS and use the KDE advanced desktop: speed.

A boot under OpenSuSE was taking nearly 2 minutes. I've just timed a boot and it's taking only 28 seconds to get to the point where the OS has finished loading and is offering me a dialogue asking me how I want to open the 4GB SD card I have in at the moment. That kind of speed difference seems to be consistent across all the applications starting up. I don't know anywhere near enough about Linux to be able to say why that might be, but it is enough to make the eeePC easy to use for the 1 thing I want to look up quickly, rather than waiting an age for it to boot. If I wanted to wait, I'd go back to MS Windows!

My one issue exists because I installed OpenSuSE. The 20GB solid state disk appears to be made up of a 4GB onboard unit supported by a 16GB secondary disk. I have no issue about the fact that the two are separate. My problem is that the recovery disk provided with the eeePC doesn't reconfigure this disk for you. As it stands, I have only the 4GB internal drive configured. The solution to this problem is trickier than I expected - I have created a partition, used fstab to say what it is and can now use mount /dev/sdb1 to mount it. But these doesn't seem to be any way to get it to automount. Even setting two linux gurus that I know onto the problem hasn't yielded a solution. I'll post one when / if I find one.

The eeePC offers a good enough screen and enough performance that I can do the image, layout and web based work I always have done. The screen is a little small but at 1024x600 pixels is just large enough to be usable. Gimp and Scribus work fine (if a little cramped). Even the Second Life client runs fast enough to be usable when all the settings are turned down. Thunderbird and Skype are already installed and Flock works well and is easy to install.

Oh, and battery life is over 2 and a half hours. Long enough, and longer using less taxing applications.

My next task is to find out if my HP can be repaired and how much / how long that will take. In the mean-time, I'm happy and productive with my eeePC.

Alan

Found inspiration

A key element in my creative process is being aware of what is possible. Some of this comes from experimentation or re-working elements of previous projects, but just as important is seeing what everyone else is doing. It's always a great inspiration to me to see other people doing great stuff. It encourages me to raise my game and new ideas get incorporated on all sorts of levels.

This is my top list of sites that I watch for inspiration (in no particular order):

1. www.styleboost.com - One of the best sites I know of that lists the best-of-the-best websites from a design and interaction perspective.

2. www.newwebpick.com - A great design portal that both indexes great websites but also sells (at a very reasonable subscription) a great Flash based magazine - and they also give away a free version that has about 20% of the content from the full version. Well worth a look!

3. www.conceptart.org - This is an all time-favourite of mine and is the home of some amazing resident artists as well as a busy forum that covers both 2D and 3D, digital and analogue artwork. It's a great place to see a lot of amazing work, get help and feedback.

4. www.juxtapoz.com - An interesting selection of works from modern artists. Always a lot going on and covers a good range styles. Covers launches and gallery shows.

5. www.plasticandplush.com - Like toys? Like character design? I love this site, it's an amazing source of fun inspiration.

6. www.eatpoo.com - One of my long standing favourites amongst the main art forums, because of the high standard of the artwork that gets posted here and the quality of the people that make up it's uses. Much more focused to 2D artwork than 3D.


There are a few more sites that should also get a mention just for being so cool or useful:

1. peaceloveandhappiness.org - A really great site 'free software for art, music and personal creativity'. You will find things like fonts and images in this site as well. Very useful!

2. www.morguefile.com - A great source of community generated hi-rez photography, most of which is free to download and use, as long as you check the licence for each image and credit where necessary.

3. www.pdf-mags.com - If you are stuck for something fresh to read, this is a great place to look - lists all the latest released PDF magazines. Very handy.

4. www.colourlovers.com - Sometimes the thing that I get stuck on is designing colour palettes and colourlovers is a site dedicated to just that - great colour palettes. Very useful, well worth a visit. An the palettes can be downloaded as a variety of formats including photoshop palette files.

5. www.tokyoplastic.com - This site has been around for a while and is just stunning. The best example of content = interface = brand that I have found.


Alan

Going Open Source - Part 2

It's now been 3 weeks since my laptop munched it's hard disk and I took the (long overdue) opportunity to try and take all my studio functions onto an open source platform.

The install went well, most things worked with little or no tinkering.

Now we come to software. There is a set of software applications that I need to find open source alternatives to, because if I don't then I can't work.

My list of essentials is:

• Photoshop, illustrator, Indesign, Flash, Director and Dreamweaver, all by Adobe
• Blender, Open Office, Flock, Skype, Thunderbird and Second Life
• Some decent fonts

First let me say that the latter all come with Linux versions, Blender and Open Office are either pre-installed with my chosen distribution (Ubuntu Studio) or are available via the inbuilt application installer service. Easy. Worked first time. Apart from one annoying thing about blender in that it doesn't recognise my ALT key, so some of the key combinations don't work properly.

Originally I was planning to find a solution for the Blender / ALT key problem and post that in part 3, but thanks to Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org I now have an answer to this and a mostly working copy of Photoshop.

For the ALT key problem: Go to System >> Preferences >> Windows, and under Movement Key, pick "Super (Windows Key)" instead of "Alt". Worked perfectly for me.

Flock and the Second Life client are both worth noting in that whilst they were both very easy to download and install, the hardest part (ironically) is the process for making a desktop icon for each application. This involves writing a short text file in the following format:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Second Life
Comment=Second Life Linux Client
Exec="/home/alan/secondlife/secondlife"
Icon=/home/alan/secondlife/res-sdl/ll_icon.BMP
Path=$HOME/secondlife
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Categories=Network;Application;
GenericName[en_US]=Second Life

This example is taken from my Second Life desktop icon, but the format is the same for any. The file itself needs to be saved in the root of your home area and needs to be named appname.desktop where appname is replaced by the name of your chosen application. I'd be very interested to hear if someone knows of an easier / point and click way of doing this?

Finding replacements for the assortment of Adobe software that I use has been a trickier task, compounded by the fact that some of the technologies are proprietry and won't be available from anyone else. My experience of finding replacements is something like this:

Photoshop: this is the hardest one of the bunch and also the tool that I use the most. There are a number of packages out there that give up to about 70% of the features available from Photoshop. Gimp and Xara Extreme are both high on my list, and Paint.NET looks to be very promising if I can get it to work (no success yet).

Again I need to credit Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org for pointing me to their Wiki page on running Adobe Photoshop under Wine. Which after a complete removal and reinstall of Wine, worked perfectly apart from two things. First, I'm installing from Creative Suite which includes all the Adobe software and comes on 5 CDs. Problem is that the installer fails to recognise when you change from disk 1 to the next disk. Thankfully, Photoshop is on disk 1. The second problem is that the Activation and the Updater both fail. The activator throws an error exclaiming “not enough disk space available to run this program” and promptly closes, but leaves Photoshop running, and the updater just sits there and does nothing. Neither are exactly catastrophic problems – the software works just fine.

I'm still going to try and get Paint.NET working though. If there is an option to use native Linux, opensource alternatives then that's my preferred solution.

Illustrator: Inkscape pretty much has this one covered. It's fairly easy to use and is similar enough that finding the equivalent tools in the software is not too much of a problem. This piece of software came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Indesign: Scribus is on first glance (and I haven't made much use of it yet - just a simple A5 flyer layout) a good replacement for indesign. Again, this application came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Flash: To be honest, Flash is what it is and I wouldn't attempt to find an alternative. Flash 8 installs fine under Wine. Works exactly as you would expect. Installing Wine is very easy, as it can be found in the application installer service.

Director: I use director for a lot of CD-ROM based materials and a fair amount of legacy stuff. The installer worked fine, but I haven't yet managed to get the application to start. I'll update on my progress in Part 3.

Dreamweaver: There is an alternative – Quanta Plus. It's available via the application installer service. This one isn't as good a fit as the other alternatives. Whilst it has a good functionality and includes templates, site management and all the usual stuff, inluding an in-window preview render of the page, that preview is not editable. Personally speaking, I use dreamweaver because of the ability to chop between editing direct into the rendered representation of the page and the underlying code at will. This is why Quanta Plus doesn't work for me. Not because it's a bad piece of software, but because it isn't a fit for the way I want to work. This is also compounded by the fact that Dreamweaver 8 installs and works perfectly under Wine. So for web page work, I know which one I'm choosing.

BUT (and this goes for any of these applications) if anyone has a recommendation for any alternative applications, or ways to make things work then please post them here and I'll follow up on them in Part 3.

And I suppose it's worth making a point about that too: there will be a part 3. I've been using Ubuntu Studio for 3 weeks now. It's not perfect. I still spend time sorting things out. Making odd things work that really, just ought to work. I have yet to finish with printers, fonts, laptop mode and drivers for things like my MP3 player and Wacom tablet. But despite this, there is a very solid alternative to anything by Microsoft and I have no desire to go back.

Pale

Going Open Source - Part 1

For a few months now I have had the idea that I would force myself to spend some time and see if it was yet possible to replace all my software with open source equivalents and get to a state where I could work as I normally would. Now, I've had this idea for a while but never quite managed to get round to it.

Then my hard disk on my laptop decided to crash the heads on the disk right into all the files that it needs to start Windows. OK then. Faced with the choice of reinstalling Windows, and the opportunity to try something else, I seized the moment.

To make sure that I can actually work, though, I am allowing myself a get out clause: I can use MS Windows software, but on the condition that I can get it running on my Linux installation (and not in a virtual machine either).

Next comes the choice of which of many flavours of the Linux distribution to use. This is a hard choice: there are a lot of good distributions now which provide for easy installation and a good user experience.

I have some experience with Ubuntu Linux distributions (I have my backup service running at home on an old PC with a lot of disk space under Ubuntu) and was interested to see that they now have Ubuntu Studio – a distribution aimed at creatives and packed with graphics, audio and video tools.

The download of 800MB went smoothly, as did burning the image onto a DVD-R.

I assumed that this wasn't going to go smoothly. I thought that this was going to take more than one go. I guessed that I would end up with a mostly working laptop but things like graphics drivers, remote control, web cam, maybe even audio would not be working right.

I'm amazed to say, 2 days after doing the install, that everything works. And more-or-less from the moment it's installed.

Now, there are a few differences between a Linux install and a Windows install that a habitual Windows user (that would be me) will find interesting.

First and foremost, you don't have to answer 40 or so questions to get the install completed. I went with the defaults and opted to configure the network elements later. All went smoothly first time.

Secondly, because of the wealth of open source software available for Linux, the operating system comes with its own application install manager that already knows about a large proportion of the software (and drivers) that are available and can just go ahead and install it for you.

My wireless network card was automatically identified and installed, and my NVidia graphics card was identified and 'safe' drivers used. All I had to do was ask the application installer to add the drivers for my graphics card, and hey presto, one re-boot later, working graphics.

Audio needed no attention and worked straight away.

Then it came down to applications. Ubuntu studio comes with a huge amount of software: 3D modelling and animation, 2D graphics, print document layout, audio and video editing to name just some of the things that are catered for.

My problem is that I love Dreamweaver. And what I am still struggling with (and will take any recommendations for) is a Linux native web page design tool with a good interface and site management and ftp tools built in. This is where my get out clause comes into effect: until I find an alternative I want to use Dreamweaver.

Windows software on a Linux OS? Yes, with the help of a compatibility library called Wine. This is available via the application installer and allows Windows software to be run under Linux. Essentially, you just run the installer from a terminal window, and the application installs, icons appear in your application menu and it just works. Amazing huh?

So, where I am right now is writing this, in Open office Writer, I have Flock, Second Life, Thunderbird, Skype, MS Remote Desktop client and Dreamweaver all installed and working.

The most important thing for me is to find a good graphics package that is as close as possible to the way Adobe Photoshop works. Photoshop is probably the main tool that I use because of it's versatility. Then I need to sort out fonts and printers. To find out what happens, watch the Pale Heretic site or blog for part 2.

Pale

The magic first half-hour

Over the years I have spent quite a bit of time (probably a little too much) playing computer games of one type or another. The experiences from them vary widely, but there is one common element that in my view either makes or breaks that experience and will set a lot of the tone for the next 100 hours.

'The magic first hour' is the experience of how a new game – a new world – caters for your arrival, manages the suspension of disbelief at the same time as explaining to you exactly what it is you are supposed to be doing.... and does this in a way that makes you want to continue.
Car race games don't need to make a great fuss about mechanics and controls at this point and have the freedom to focus on backstory and plot. Fantasy games and MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Games) in particular have a much more complex player interaction as well as (usually) a deeper and more convoluted story. It is this type of game that offers us some of the best examples of how to bring a new user to an environment that can be difficult to master.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a great example of a good strategy for doing this. They player starts and makes as few permanent choices as possible and well placed in-game pointers and pop-up help continually adds new information and help for the player. As the player progresses, in-game characters reveal more information, choices and instructions. This ensures that the player starts with a relatively small amount information that they need to retain, and that this is expanded in line with their growing experience of the game. Both the plot and the geographical area that the player is exposed to grow in the same manner.

It's the start of this learning period that I'm calling the magic first half-hour.

Over the past couple of years there has been an explosion of the number of free-to-play MMORPGs that are available, and I have played a number of them. Some follow a model similar to WoW an lead the player in, carefully expanding their knowledge and experience, helping at every stage. Some however don't. It's all to common a sensation to be dropped into game, with little clue how to use the game or what to do first. It's these games that I don't go back to and are right on the top of my 'things to un-install' list.

The message I think is true beyond just games - either progressively help the new user or risk losing them very quickly, regardless of how good your product actually is. If they don't feel supported and don't engage with it, they won't use it.

I also think that the actual duration and format of this exchange varies. For a web site, the duration is down to below a minute. The exchange is subliminal – a good, well presented design makes it apparent which elements of the site are navigational, or projects the right air of intrigue that the user will feel encouraged to explore the interface to find the content and navigation for themselves.
When first starting to use a new application or device such as mobile phone or mp3 player, the interface is critical to your comprehension of how to use it. For the majority of users of this type of technology (ones that have used something similar before) a well designed product should be intuitive. And these days it's pretty well true – use one mobile phone you can use them all, some fairly minor trial-and-error. But think back 10 years to how easy it wasn't to set the timer on your VHS recorder.

I'd also apply this to things like Second Life, which does a reasonable job of starting you on the path to learning how to use the interface, how to interact with the world itself and your avatar and how to communicate. Having introduced this technology 20 or so people in the last couple of months, they almost all agree that what happens next is the problem. You complete your training, know how to go places and chat with people and are dropped off in-world with little guidance of what to do next. It's an experience a bit like showing someone who has never seen the World Wide Web before and and sitting them in front of a web browser and saying “here you are .... go explore”.Providing starting points would be a great idea.

The same is true for visiting some new locations in Second Life. Bad design leaves me feeling unsure as to where I'm supposed to go, where my introduction is, what I should expect and what this place is all about. The next thing that usually happens is I move on and explore somewhere else – the poor arrival negates my desire to explore: if the start is uninspiring will the rest be any different?
Don't forget the new user experience. I've worked on a lot of projects where the induction for new users is one of the last elements to be added in – often because it relies on the finalisation of all the other elements. The key is not to rush this, to think about the range of your target audience and how to lead them into the experience you have crafted for them, in a way that they will readily understand.

Pale